You might remember the uproar last year when Boston University medical student Philip Markoff was accused by police of using Craigslist, one of the Internet’s most popular sites, to find females to assault or kill. What stunned a lot of people was that Craigslist openly had an erotic services section that clearly promoted prostitution. Forty three attorney generals in different states went so far as to accuse the company of operating an online brothel by allowing prostitutes to advertise on its site. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said about Craigslist in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair, which carries a riveting story about the Markoff case, “They were certainly enablers insofar as their ads linked the victim and the alleged killer, and they had fair warning their ads were putting people in danger.”

So what did Craigslist do? Well, they did start blocking those ads that blatantly solicited prostitution. They also blocked the graphic nude images of the prostitutes themselves. Sort of. (more…)